Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

For anyone using a 329×277 monitor, I made you a wallpaper! You can use it for a little while but remember to credit me!! (If you can’t see the image then someone must have stolen it…)

In the above wallpaper, you see a glimpse of the number line. A number line is a complicated mathematical concept meaning a line of numbers. The wallpaper only features a short bit though, because people have come up with quite many other numbers too (for example, 1, 7264, 25, -1, and goooooooooooogle).

36 is one of the tourist attractions on our sight-seeing trip through the number line. It’s both a square number, a triangular number, and a circular number at the same time. If you have a room consisting of exactly one of them, the sum of the room’s elements is 36 – although no formal proof of this has ever been written.

But if you have two of them chilling out in the same room, their sum is 72, the amount of hours in the LD jam. Coincidentally, 72 divided by two is 36,which has piqued the interest of the international community of angry bloggers seeing a conspiracy everywhere.

Now, if these two 36s couldn’t find a way out of the room, one could insert the other into a phone number to make an international direct-dialphone call to Hungary with the code +36. They could then call Englkyklös “Glxblt” Vasarnàpzsczitzocwek (no relation to the popular car salesman) to ask him about his opinion on the Māori legend about the creation of mankind where 36 gods assembled the various parts of the first human.

Good old Englkyklös would answer in his usual wisdom, paraphrasing a carefully selected contemplative Zen koan: “Would you fucking stop it with these prank calls already? This is the 36th time.”

Meanwhile somewhere else, but still on Earth, a scientist (age 36) returns to his laboratory, deep in the basement of a lucratively funded research complex. He meets with an army major with 36 medals, and they both turn their keys in two36 secure locks at the same time, opening massive blast doors. The scientist then carries on, putting on equipment he got for free from the Australian basketball team, The Adelaide 36ers.

It’s not protective equipment or anything, he’s just a fan of the team.

The scientist then carries a piece of krypton from the hazardous materials storage using a 36-inch pipe wrench (known colloquially in the American oilfield business as “a 36” – and in Europe as “a 91.44”).

He carefully places the piece on a desk, rips off the warning labels about krypton exposure from the 36 kilograms of explosives someone’s left lying around again, takes out an electron microscope, and zooms in as close as he can get.

Okay, this is weird– Whoops, the microscope was nowhere close to the piece. Hehe, I guess accidents happen even to professionals! The scientist reminisces about the time he lucked out a perfect score of 36 on the ACT tests by just answering questions randomly, and concludes total chaos is the foundation of good science.

After watching 36 videos from the weird part of Youtube to procrastinate, he then adjusts the position of the microscope 36 times before getting it right.

Finally, the results are conclusive: the atomic number of krypton is still 36 today.

…

But after all this, where does the concept of Love come in? What’s so special about Niels Bohr anyway? And who the hell ordered 36 extra large pizzas to my address? I’m not gonna pay for these, that’s for sure.